A Discussion of American Propaganda & the Mass Media from the Spanish American War to the Present

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

The Second Front, an interesting paragraph

"The president personility made the decision to deploy a pool of reporters to cover just cause with the agreement of the Secretary of Defense and the chair men of the Joint Chiefs of staff. Thier decision should dispel the fear that the media pool would never be used in actual combat. Every decision that we made during just cause was intenmded to facilitate open, timely media coverage of the operation", (Williams) This comment to me in a way gets me angered because its such a blatent lie. What they did prevent in this instance was coverage of El Chorrillo, which is a extremly poor area where General Manuel Noriega was. It was his head quarters and when it was attacked many innocent civilians were killed. there were over 300 hundred people killed and many were buried alive in thier own houses. This was truely a catastrophy, and a sad mishap. but once again the military was able to cover up this terrible accedint. The military covers this horrible accedent in a very timely fashion not to ruin the mission. The truth will come out down the line but its almost irrelevent. This is where im indifferent i believe that in a democracy we should have the right to know about these mistakes made , and these are human beings we cant just forget about them. But yet from a military perspective it could ruin the mission.

1 Comments:

The El Chorrillo incident is a good illustration of how the pool system can be used to limit coverage until it is too late to make a difference. Would the public accept the reality that war involve civilian causalties, despite the best efforts of our military to minimize them? How many images of dead children would it take to stop a war? What if that war was a just war?